14 ms·

Hungary plans new tax on Internet traffic

254 points by pzs 12y ago

bujatt 12y ago
This is insane. As a local I can't decide whether this action is just to deter public discourse on the recent claims of political corruption (that involved banning the Director of National Tax Authority from entering US) or if it is for real. Either cases are really, really bad.
- blumkvist 12y ago
  Orban is fucking insane! What the hell are you thinking? I hope you will get rid of that maniac ASAP.
  - peterfirefly 12y ago
    What are his chances of staying out of jail when/if he relinquishes power?
venomsnake 12y ago
Holy shit ... downloading a steam game will cost more than the game. They already get VAT on the connectivity. First - IT in Hungary dies. Second Hungary is on the bleeding edge of mesh networks. A 60 cents per terrabyte excise seems less unreasonable.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  I can definitely see wide LANs or mesh networks starting to appear in Hungary, and I can also see the government making them "illegal" within 3 years of them appearing (would probably impact LANs more than mesh networks, but probably not that much either of them).
  - ccozan 12y ago
    Actually this smells like a business oportunity from the neighbour Romania providers to offer hi speed microwave / wireless links from over the border. Couple that with a mesh network, you got "free" internet ( as in free speech ).
  - fsiefken 12y ago
    exactly, more power to projectmeshnet.org and serval. they can always resurrect fidonet, it's still in use in Ukraine and Russia. host mirrors of the most popular resources, wikipedia, imdb, gem, apt and git repository's just like in the bbs & ftp days. use goldbug for mail and chat, yacy for a veronica like meshspace search engine and twister and tribbler for p2p blogging and vlogging.
- robotresearcher 12y ago
  The monthly cost per subscriber is capped at $4ish.
soooopopular 12y ago
About fucking time. This should be a strong example to countries around the world on how to help bring back economies from the global recession.
phaer 12y ago
That might be a good situation to remember that almost all television and radio stations in Hungary are under governmental control and so it might make sense for the government to keep people away from too much Internet usage.
sz4kerto 12y ago
Some background. - the proposed rate is 150 HUF/GB, that's around 0.5 EUR/GB or 60 cents/GB. - the internet speeds in Hungary are relatively high, it's quite common to get 100 Mbps for $20/mo - the minimum wage is around 250 USD/mo, the average net wage is $650/mo - the levy should be paid by the providers, but probably they're going to be able to deduct it from their other taxes, that means profitable companies won't pay, currently non-profitable companies will - the tax will be capped per subscription, the cap is rumored to be around $4 for individuals and around $25 for companies -- but most households have 2-3-4 phones, cable internet, etc. - it's very likely that this is going to wipe out the currently loss-making telcos that can then be bought by the state (nationalized) and their assets funneled to cronies (even there was a public bid for the assets nobody would start a new company as it'd be making losses in the beginning therefore they could not deduct this tax from their taxes -- so it'd result in even more losses) Also, it's very much likely that this is a deliberate distraction from the political conflict between the USA and Hungary that has emerged last week. (Edit: it's still bad though, as a journalist put it, it's like spraying pepper in the eyes of a pitbull: it's distracting, but you might end up in a really big trouble.)
- pentium10 12y ago
  internet speeds in Hungary are not so high. Look at east Romania what offers, you get 1GBps for 7 euro/mo.
  - sz4kerto 12y ago
    Romania is really an outlier -- but compared to the USA or the UK, Hungary still fares very well (a cheap 100 Mbps internet basically 'should be enough for anyone' -- not completely true, but that can serve multiple 4K video streams at the same time, so for most households it's perfect).
    - Ecio78 12y ago
      I am paying 50euro/month for 30Mbit/10Mbit Fiber in Luxembourg :/ In Italy I was paying about 25-30Euro/month for 20Mbit/1Mbit ADSL (and actually 20 was never 20 but more around 12-15..
pentium10 12y ago
there is an upper limit(cap) in the tax, per month, max 700 HUF (2.2 EUR) for population and max 5000 HUF (16.3 EUR) for companies. This text is hidden in the proposal. Just media is not reading it with attention.
- sz4kerto 12y ago
  Nope, it isn't. The proposal (http://itcafe.hu/dl/cnt/2014-10/112746/01705.pdf http://itcafe.hu/dl/cnt/2014-10/112746/01705.pdf) only contains the number '700' twice, one is unrelated, at the other occurrence the text says that the tax on phone calls and text messages cannot exceed HUF 700/mo/subscription. After the outrage now there're rumors about these caps, but they were not part of the proposal.
  - pentium10 12y ago
    I confirm it will be a cap, even if you can't find in the text. It will be 700.
    - sz4kerto 12y ago
      As a result of an amendment after the major uproar. You said that "This text is hidden in the proposal. Just media is not reading it with attention." Both statements are untrue.
      - leni536 12y ago
        As a result of an amendment after the major uproar. Isn't this why we have proposals?
dzhiurgis 12y ago
I think the only thing surprising about this is that it happened sooner than later. Eventually we will see more states imposing taxes on information. In a sense, if they gave you free education and you used that education to create new information, then they own a certain stake in it. Just like sales tax is used to subsidise or oversee certain business, data tax will be used fund cyber policing, censorship and such. Also, it may ensure that we don't drown ourselves into pointless data. Just like businesses are forced to engage in certain activities (typically innovative) that can generate certain markup for the whole system to be sustainable.
- chton 12y ago
  But information isn't a taxable item, since it's not a monetary amount. It would be like taxing electricity. You can tax the money you pay for it, but not the information itself. You're not using your education to generate data. Most of the data is made by other people's education and then multiplied many times. Even for cases where you do create information, like in your comment, many magnitudes more data was sent over your line to get it before my eyes. If they wanted to tax new information, they wouldn't do it through a flat fee per GB. Sales tax is a tax on a monetary exchange. You tax the price you pay for your shoes, you don't tax "$3 per shoe". The point of that is taxing value rather than quantity. How you use the tax money it is irrelevant to how you acquire it. And last but not least: we're already drowning in 'pointless data'. A lot of the internet's capacity is used to transfer scripts and styles rather than real information. Whether you consider that pointless is a different matter, but it's not up to the government to say what you should consider pointless data and what you shouldn't.
  - dzhiurgis 12y ago
    > like taxing electricity Carbon credits?
    - chton 12y ago
      Carbon credits are a sale of "carbon capacity" for money, again here the money is taxed, not the credits themselves.
edem 12y ago
Actually this is just a smoke screen. As a native Hungarian I can tell you this. The Hungarian government is doing business with the Russians (we build a nuclear power plant funded by Russian loan) which the EU and the USA does not like. I don't like it either because Russia is blackmailing Hungary. There can be no good outcome of this situation because we either infuriate the Russians (we depend on the Russian gas) or the EU/USA. So the government came up with this tax nonsense as a distraction. As you can see they achieved their goal. Everybody is talking about the internet tax while the government is doing business with the Russians under cover. I don't like the 150 HUF/GB but I know how it works here. There will be an upper bound per month (say 4000 HUF) for the tax. The ISPs can put this tax as an expense in their books and in the end the user will see something around 1000-2000 HUF per month plus. This is how it goes here. Make no mistake I do not protect our government or the Russians. I hate both but I want you to see what really goes on here.
- Sevores 12y ago
  Actually I think it’s more related to the corruption charges: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/20/us-usa-hungary-idUSKCN0I921220141020 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/20/us-usa-hungary-idU...
- coldtea 12y ago
  >So the government came up with this tax nonsense as a distraction. As you can see they achieved their goal. Everybody is talking about the internet tax while the government is doing business with the Russians under cover. Sorry, but lest this is marked as "informative" by anyone due to it coming from a native Hungarian, I'd like to say (as a neighborhood) that this "it's a distraction" sounds like the usual ideas of how goverment works put forward by some blogs, columnists, that are not really grounded in reality. It's not like Hungary only does "business with the Russians" for the very short term that this will be in the news, for it being a "distraction" to be effective. It's also not like there would be any popular backslash on "doing business with the Russians" at this particular time either, so that they would need a distraction. It's more likely that they just wanted an extra tax and some extra dough coming their way, and came up with this, sans distraction nonsense.
rdl 12y ago
I'm maybe a bit more libertarian than most HN readers, which is already a bit more libertarian than most people (especially Europeans), but when I do support taxes, I'd rather they be as broad-based as possible, unless they're targeting something which has negative externalities. Universally applied VAT is (aside from the data-collection requirements) proven to be one of the least economically distorting taxes -- creating the least deadweight loss. This tax seems almost pathologically bad -- taxing something with largely positive externalities. Normally you try "sin taxes" which tax things reviewed as having NEGATIVE externalities (CO2, smoking, even unhealthy foods). It's like taxing people for reading books, or for volunteering their time to useful charities, or for picking up litter on the street. Actively discouraging something which has positive returns to society as a whole when people use more of it!
- flexie 12y ago
  The Internet, while most of us don't care, has negative externalities as well: - killing hundreds of thousands of businesses such as bookstores, movie rental stores, record stores; - makes it possible through IP telephony, email, the web, collaboration tools etc. to outsource millions of jobs; - is a time consumer like no other before; Yes, the Internet creates businesses as well but I don't think I've ever used a Hungarian Internet business. Also, the outsourced jobs go mainly to Asia. I could see why a conservative government would tax the Internet.
  - sz4kerto 12y ago
    > I don't think I've ever used a Hungarian Internet business There are a couple of successful ones though - Ustream is quite widely used, so is LogMeIn or LiveJasmin (webcam porn).
  - m0g 12y ago
    If I'm not mistaken, prezi is hungarian and very widely used
  - nightcracker 12y ago
    I really hate this mindset. These businesses aren't being killed by the internet - they've simply outlived their use. This is the risk of being a business in transport. If a cheaper, faster and more accessible form of transport comes along you go out of business. Not because something has killed you or your business (you are perfectly allowed to still do your business as you like), but because you aren't useful anymore. For example the milkman disappeared with the invention of refrigerated transport. Not because the milkman was killed, but because he was no longer useful. Please, do not defend things that are not useful. s/milkman/CD/ s/refrigerated transport/internet file transfer/
yottah 12y ago
I really think EU/NATO/US should step up covert and intelligence activities to overthrow the Hungarian government. A backwards and evil regime that has taken over Hungary should not be permitted to exist in the heart of Europe.
- pjc50 12y ago
  I don't think undemocratically overthrowing an elected government is a great idea, even if it's really unpopular. At least wait until they fail to run elections.
- riffraff 12y ago
  you might remember that at the recent budapest elections FIDESZ won again. Yes, they are a bunch of corrupt evil baby eating monsters, but they are also who the people keep voting. I am not sure "let's remove democratically elected governments we disagree with" is the direction where we want EU/NATO/US to go.
  - yottah 12y ago
    They are Pro-Putin regime in a devious way and Russia is basically in war with Europe. I think they should face some kind of heat.
    - riffraff 12y ago
      so they can over-win the next elections by campaigning as the Proud Small Sovereign David against the Evil European Union Interference? That seems a rather stupid move.
- arrrg 12y ago
  Dude, calm down. Human rights violations absolutely have to be sanctioned, sure, but transparently and above board. To be honest, at a certain point I'm fully in favor of tossing Hungary out of the EU (it's no place for authoritarian regimes), but covertly overthrowing governments? Not cool.
mistakoala 12y ago
Doesn't sound so dissimilar to the EU's Internet tax that was planned years ago (not sure if its email tax plan was part of the same thing). I don't think it would be unreasonable to assume that this plan would get some support at European level. In the UK our last government imposed an Internet tax, but at a flat monthly rate. Fortunately, it was scrapped.
- e7620 12y ago
  There have been some schemes in Europe to tax Internet-related services, but they were mostly a result of lobbying and at least benefited some group, like unionized film makers or ISPs. But the difference is nobody welcomes this tax.
rainmaking 12y ago
Internet traffic tax, aka brain drain guarantee.
- bujatt 12y ago
  Exactly. That's the most scary thing about it.
- JTon 12y ago
  Other commenters are saying there's a 700 HUF (2.2 EUR) cap for residential lines. I don't think people will be leaving the country en mass because of that
crazy1van 12y ago
This relates to my biggest fear with net neutrality. I don't think that NN and internet taxes are directly related. I just worry that once the government gets tinkering under the hood with the internet they are going to find a few other things they'd like to change as well.
landryraccoon 12y ago
Ok, this is a contrarian opinion, but I think this is a great idea. This is an experiment and there isn't any data around the impact of a broad tax on internet on the economy. If Hungary implements this tax, then every other country can use that data to inform their own decisions about taxing the internet. In reality, as everyone has already pointed out, this experiment will fail horribly - which is great, because eventually SOME country or state is going to want to do this and I'm glad the experiment is being run in Hungary and not the United States or the EU.
- mercurial 12y ago
  Hungary is a member of the EU.
  - landryraccoon 12y ago
    Well, fair enough, but does that detract from my point?
JumpCrisscross 12y ago
Let's consider the effects of a tax on internet service providers. Critically: the tax is levied in Hungary, but not in surrounding countries. The average household net-adjusted disposable income per capita in Hungary is $15 240 [1]. At 60¢ per GB, the tax is not breaking household budgets. Neither should it be onerous for bootstrapped small businesses. Moving hosting out of Hungary would mitigate most of their tax burden (live media would be an exception). The case becomes more interesting when we consider scaling. Few businesses today can compete with underpowered IT. The bandwidth needs of a business's IT operations can be assumed to scale with the enterprise. Speaking as a financier, this sets up an easy transaction. If your business scales, move it out of Hungary. The benefits of offshoring scale with the company. Avoiding that incentive structure is probably why we see the corporate tax offset. But a tax deduction is only of value to profitable companies. This turns the linear scaling disadvantage into an option-like structure. If you scale AND experience losses, there is a penalty for being in Hungary. The more cyclical or volatile a company's earnings, the greater the risk of incurring the tax and thus the benefit for offshoring. If I were a European M&A banker, I'd be working out the ceiling on earnings volatility a Hungarian company would rationally tolerate given this tax. I'd then run through the stock market and private holdings records and begin working to merge those for whom this tax would be risky out of Hungary. Start-ups are also loss-making business entities. For a bootstrapping Hungarian, the cost of relocation isn't worth a few hundred dollars in tax savings. But for a VC it may be. If I were Austria, the Czech Republic or Poland, I'd offer every Hungarian entrepreneur a deal: We will lend you money for relocation. You repay it at 1/2 the tax we estimate you would have paid in Hungary. If I were a European VC, I'd be dusting off a recruiting pitch for bright Hungarian engineers and entrepreneurs. [1] http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/hungary/ http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/hungary/
freshflowers 12y ago
The libertarian panic is amusing. There's nothing inherently wrong with taxing internet traffic, unless you believe tax itself is wrong. Virtually everything that goes into providing internet services gets taxed, so why should internet traffic itself be sacred? Of course it is still a Very Bad Idea(TM) in terms of economic and social impact versus benefits. And of course in the context of a totally corrupt country like Hungary there is a distasteful hidden agenda behind it. But besides being counterproductive, tax on internet traffic is just "meh". We just don't want to pay tax on our stuff.
- DINKDINK 12y ago
  Would you say that 501.3c's are a bad idea? If not, they you have to agree that shielding certain activities from taxes is in the best interest for society. So why do you think increasing the barrier to entry for a society to communicate, create, discuss is positive?
imaginenore 12y ago
Does anybody know how to make the server execute "git pull" once I push the code from my local machine? I see some convoluted tutorials that involve setting up certificates and such, I wonder if there's an easier way.

254 points by pzs 12y ago

This is insane. As a local I can't decide whether this action is just to deter public discourse on the recent claims of political corruption (that involved banning the Director of National Tax Authority from entering US) or if it is for real. Either cases are really, really bad.

blumkvist 12y ago
Orban is fucking insane! What the hell are you thinking? I hope you will get rid of that maniac ASAP.
- peterfirefly 12y ago
  What are his chances of staying out of jail when/if he relinquishes power?

venomsnake 12y ago

Holy shit ... downloading a steam game will cost more than the game. They already get VAT on the connectivity. First - IT in Hungary dies. Second Hungary is on the bleeding edge of mesh networks. A 60 cents per terrabyte excise seems less unreasonable.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
higherpurpose 12y ago
I can definitely see wide LANs or mesh networks starting to appear in Hungary, and I can also see the government making them "illegal" within 3 years of them appearing (would probably impact LANs more than mesh networks, but probably not that much either of them).
- ccozan 12y ago
  Actually this smells like a business oportunity from the neighbour Romania providers to offer hi speed microwave / wireless links from over the border. Couple that with a mesh network, you got "free" internet ( as in free speech ).
- fsiefken 12y ago
  exactly, more power to projectmeshnet.org and serval. they can always resurrect fidonet, it's still in use in Ukraine and Russia. host mirrors of the most popular resources, wikipedia, imdb, gem, apt and git repository's just like in the bbs & ftp days. use goldbug for mail and chat, yacy for a veronica like meshspace search engine and twister and tribbler for p2p blogging and vlogging.
robotresearcher 12y ago
The monthly cost per subscriber is capped at $4ish.

soooopopular 12y ago

About fucking time. This should be a strong example to countries around the world on how to help bring back economies from the global recession.

phaer 12y ago

That might be a good situation to remember that almost all television and radio stations in Hungary are under governmental control and so it might make sense for the government to keep people away from too much Internet usage.

sz4kerto 12y ago

Some background. - the proposed rate is 150 HUF/GB, that's around 0.5 EUR/GB or 60 cents/GB. - the internet speeds in Hungary are relatively high, it's quite common to get 100 Mbps for $20/mo - the minimum wage is around 250 USD/mo, the average net wage is $650/mo - the levy should be paid by the providers, but probably they're going to be able to deduct it from their other taxes, that means profitable companies won't pay, currently non-profitable companies will - the tax will be capped per subscription, the cap is rumored to be around $4 for individuals and around $25 for companies -- but most households have 2-3-4 phones, cable internet, etc. - it's very likely that this is going to wipe out the currently loss-making telcos that can then be bought by the state (nationalized) and their assets funneled to cronies (even there was a public bid for the assets nobody would start a new company as it'd be making losses in the beginning therefore they could not deduct this tax from their taxes -- so it'd result in even more losses) Also, it's very much likely that this is a deliberate distraction from the political conflict between the USA and Hungary that has emerged last week. (Edit: it's still bad though, as a journalist put it, it's like spraying pepper in the eyes of a pitbull: it's distracting, but you might end up in a really big trouble.)

pentium10 12y ago
internet speeds in Hungary are not so high. Look at east Romania what offers, you get 1GBps for 7 euro/mo.
- sz4kerto 12y ago
  Romania is really an outlier -- but compared to the USA or the UK, Hungary still fares very well (a cheap 100 Mbps internet basically 'should be enough for anyone' -- not completely true, but that can serve multiple 4K video streams at the same time, so for most households it's perfect).
  - Ecio78 12y ago
    I am paying 50euro/month for 30Mbit/10Mbit Fiber in Luxembourg :/ In Italy I was paying about 25-30Euro/month for 20Mbit/1Mbit ADSL (and actually 20 was never 20 but more around 12-15..

pentium10 12y ago

there is an upper limit(cap) in the tax, per month, max 700 HUF (2.2 EUR) for population and max 5000 HUF (16.3 EUR) for companies. This text is hidden in the proposal. Just media is not reading it with attention.

sz4kerto 12y ago
Nope, it isn't. The proposal (http://itcafe.hu/dl/cnt/2014-10/112746/01705.pdf http://itcafe.hu/dl/cnt/2014-10/112746/01705.pdf) only contains the number '700' twice, one is unrelated, at the other occurrence the text says that the tax on phone calls and text messages cannot exceed HUF 700/mo/subscription. After the outrage now there're rumors about these caps, but they were not part of the proposal.
- pentium10 12y ago
  I confirm it will be a cap, even if you can't find in the text. It will be 700.
  - sz4kerto 12y ago
    As a result of an amendment after the major uproar. You said that "This text is hidden in the proposal. Just media is not reading it with attention." Both statements are untrue.
    - leni536 12y ago
      As a result of an amendment after the major uproar. Isn't this why we have proposals?

dzhiurgis 12y ago

I think the only thing surprising about this is that it happened sooner than later. Eventually we will see more states imposing taxes on information. In a sense, if they gave you free education and you used that education to create new information, then they own a certain stake in it. Just like sales tax is used to subsidise or oversee certain business, data tax will be used fund cyber policing, censorship and such. Also, it may ensure that we don't drown ourselves into pointless data. Just like businesses are forced to engage in certain activities (typically innovative) that can generate certain markup for the whole system to be sustainable.

chton 12y ago
But information isn't a taxable item, since it's not a monetary amount. It would be like taxing electricity. You can tax the money you pay for it, but not the information itself. You're not using your education to generate data. Most of the data is made by other people's education and then multiplied many times. Even for cases where you do create information, like in your comment, many magnitudes more data was sent over your line to get it before my eyes. If they wanted to tax new information, they wouldn't do it through a flat fee per GB. Sales tax is a tax on a monetary exchange. You tax the price you pay for your shoes, you don't tax "$3 per shoe". The point of that is taxing value rather than quantity. How you use the tax money it is irrelevant to how you acquire it. And last but not least: we're already drowning in 'pointless data'. A lot of the internet's capacity is used to transfer scripts and styles rather than real information. Whether you consider that pointless is a different matter, but it's not up to the government to say what you should consider pointless data and what you shouldn't.
- dzhiurgis 12y ago
  > like taxing electricity Carbon credits?
  - chton 12y ago
    Carbon credits are a sale of "carbon capacity" for money, again here the money is taxed, not the credits themselves.

edem 12y ago

Actually this is just a smoke screen. As a native Hungarian I can tell you this. The Hungarian government is doing business with the Russians (we build a nuclear power plant funded by Russian loan) which the EU and the USA does not like. I don't like it either because Russia is blackmailing Hungary. There can be no good outcome of this situation because we either infuriate the Russians (we depend on the Russian gas) or the EU/USA. So the government came up with this tax nonsense as a distraction. As you can see they achieved their goal. Everybody is talking about the internet tax while the government is doing business with the Russians under cover. I don't like the 150 HUF/GB but I know how it works here. There will be an upper bound per month (say 4000 HUF) for the tax. The ISPs can put this tax as an expense in their books and in the end the user will see something around 1000-2000 HUF per month plus. This is how it goes here. Make no mistake I do not protect our government or the Russians. I hate both but I want you to see what really goes on here.

Sevores 12y ago
Actually I think it’s more related to the corruption charges: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/20/us-usa-hungary-idUSKCN0I921220141020 http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/20/us-usa-hungary-idU...
coldtea 12y ago
>So the government came up with this tax nonsense as a distraction. As you can see they achieved their goal. Everybody is talking about the internet tax while the government is doing business with the Russians under cover. Sorry, but lest this is marked as "informative" by anyone due to it coming from a native Hungarian, I'd like to say (as a neighborhood) that this "it's a distraction" sounds like the usual ideas of how goverment works put forward by some blogs, columnists, that are not really grounded in reality. It's not like Hungary only does "business with the Russians" for the very short term that this will be in the news, for it being a "distraction" to be effective. It's also not like there would be any popular backslash on "doing business with the Russians" at this particular time either, so that they would need a distraction. It's more likely that they just wanted an extra tax and some extra dough coming their way, and came up with this, sans distraction nonsense.

rdl 12y ago

I'm maybe a bit more libertarian than most HN readers, which is already a bit more libertarian than most people (especially Europeans), but when I do support taxes, I'd rather they be as broad-based as possible, unless they're targeting something which has negative externalities. Universally applied VAT is (aside from the data-collection requirements) proven to be one of the least economically distorting taxes -- creating the least deadweight loss. This tax seems almost pathologically bad -- taxing something with largely positive externalities. Normally you try "sin taxes" which tax things reviewed as having NEGATIVE externalities (CO2, smoking, even unhealthy foods). It's like taxing people for reading books, or for volunteering their time to useful charities, or for picking up litter on the street. Actively discouraging something which has positive returns to society as a whole when people use more of it!

flexie 12y ago
The Internet, while most of us don't care, has negative externalities as well: - killing hundreds of thousands of businesses such as bookstores, movie rental stores, record stores; - makes it possible through IP telephony, email, the web, collaboration tools etc. to outsource millions of jobs; - is a time consumer like no other before; Yes, the Internet creates businesses as well but I don't think I've ever used a Hungarian Internet business. Also, the outsourced jobs go mainly to Asia. I could see why a conservative government would tax the Internet.
- sz4kerto 12y ago
  > I don't think I've ever used a Hungarian Internet business There are a couple of successful ones though - Ustream is quite widely used, so is LogMeIn or LiveJasmin (webcam porn).
- m0g 12y ago
  If I'm not mistaken, prezi is hungarian and very widely used
- nightcracker 12y ago
  I really hate this mindset. These businesses aren't being killed by the internet - they've simply outlived their use. This is the risk of being a business in transport. If a cheaper, faster and more accessible form of transport comes along you go out of business. Not because something has killed you or your business (you are perfectly allowed to still do your business as you like), but because you aren't useful anymore. For example the milkman disappeared with the invention of refrigerated transport. Not because the milkman was killed, but because he was no longer useful. Please, do not defend things that are not useful. s/milkman/CD/ s/refrigerated transport/internet file transfer/

yottah 12y ago

I really think EU/NATO/US should step up covert and intelligence activities to overthrow the Hungarian government. A backwards and evil regime that has taken over Hungary should not be permitted to exist in the heart of Europe.

pjc50 12y ago
I don't think undemocratically overthrowing an elected government is a great idea, even if it's really unpopular. At least wait until they fail to run elections.
riffraff 12y ago
you might remember that at the recent budapest elections FIDESZ won again. Yes, they are a bunch of corrupt evil baby eating monsters, but they are also who the people keep voting. I am not sure "let's remove democratically elected governments we disagree with" is the direction where we want EU/NATO/US to go.
- yottah 12y ago
  They are Pro-Putin regime in a devious way and Russia is basically in war with Europe. I think they should face some kind of heat.
  - riffraff 12y ago
    so they can over-win the next elections by campaigning as the Proud Small Sovereign David against the Evil European Union Interference? That seems a rather stupid move.
arrrg 12y ago
Dude, calm down. Human rights violations absolutely have to be sanctioned, sure, but transparently and above board. To be honest, at a certain point I'm fully in favor of tossing Hungary out of the EU (it's no place for authoritarian regimes), but covertly overthrowing governments? Not cool.

mistakoala 12y ago

Doesn't sound so dissimilar to the EU's Internet tax that was planned years ago (not sure if its email tax plan was part of the same thing). I don't think it would be unreasonable to assume that this plan would get some support at European level. In the UK our last government imposed an Internet tax, but at a flat monthly rate. Fortunately, it was scrapped.

e7620 12y ago
There have been some schemes in Europe to tax Internet-related services, but they were mostly a result of lobbying and at least benefited some group, like unionized film makers or ISPs. But the difference is nobody welcomes this tax.

rainmaking 12y ago

Internet traffic tax, aka brain drain guarantee.

bujatt 12y ago
Exactly. That's the most scary thing about it.
JTon 12y ago
Other commenters are saying there's a 700 HUF (2.2 EUR) cap for residential lines. I don't think people will be leaving the country en mass because of that

crazy1van 12y ago

This relates to my biggest fear with net neutrality. I don't think that NN and internet taxes are directly related. I just worry that once the government gets tinkering under the hood with the internet they are going to find a few other things they'd like to change as well.

landryraccoon 12y ago

Ok, this is a contrarian opinion, but I think this is a great idea. This is an experiment and there isn't any data around the impact of a broad tax on internet on the economy. If Hungary implements this tax, then every other country can use that data to inform their own decisions about taxing the internet. In reality, as everyone has already pointed out, this experiment will fail horribly - which is great, because eventually SOME country or state is going to want to do this and I'm glad the experiment is being run in Hungary and not the United States or the EU.

mercurial 12y ago
Hungary is a member of the EU.
- landryraccoon 12y ago
  Well, fair enough, but does that detract from my point?

JumpCrisscross 12y ago

Let's consider the effects of a tax on internet service providers. Critically: the tax is levied in Hungary, but not in surrounding countries. The average household net-adjusted disposable income per capita in Hungary is $15 240 [1]. At 60¢ per GB, the tax is not breaking household budgets. Neither should it be onerous for bootstrapped small businesses. Moving hosting out of Hungary would mitigate most of their tax burden (live media would be an exception). The case becomes more interesting when we consider scaling. Few businesses today can compete with underpowered IT. The bandwidth needs of a business's IT operations can be assumed to scale with the enterprise. Speaking as a financier, this sets up an easy transaction. If your business scales, move it out of Hungary. The benefits of offshoring scale with the company. Avoiding that incentive structure is probably why we see the corporate tax offset. But a tax deduction is only of value to profitable companies. This turns the linear scaling disadvantage into an option-like structure. If you scale AND experience losses, there is a penalty for being in Hungary. The more cyclical or volatile a company's earnings, the greater the risk of incurring the tax and thus the benefit for offshoring. If I were a European M&A banker, I'd be working out the ceiling on earnings volatility a Hungarian company would rationally tolerate given this tax. I'd then run through the stock market and private holdings records and begin working to merge those for whom this tax would be risky out of Hungary. Start-ups are also loss-making business entities. For a bootstrapping Hungarian, the cost of relocation isn't worth a few hundred dollars in tax savings. But for a VC it may be. If I were Austria, the Czech Republic or Poland, I'd offer every Hungarian entrepreneur a deal: We will lend you money for relocation. You repay it at 1/2 the tax we estimate you would have paid in Hungary. If I were a European VC, I'd be dusting off a recruiting pitch for bright Hungarian engineers and entrepreneurs. [1] http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/hungary/ http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/hungary/

freshflowers 12y ago

The libertarian panic is amusing. There's nothing inherently wrong with taxing internet traffic, unless you believe tax itself is wrong. Virtually everything that goes into providing internet services gets taxed, so why should internet traffic itself be sacred? Of course it is still a Very Bad Idea(TM) in terms of economic and social impact versus benefits. And of course in the context of a totally corrupt country like Hungary there is a distasteful hidden agenda behind it. But besides being counterproductive, tax on internet traffic is just "meh". We just don't want to pay tax on our stuff.

DINKDINK 12y ago
Would you say that 501.3c's are a bad idea? If not, they you have to agree that shielding certain activities from taxes is in the best interest for society. So why do you think increasing the barrier to entry for a society to communicate, create, discuss is positive?

imaginenore 12y ago

Does anybody know how to make the server execute "git pull" once I push the code from my local machine? I see some convoluted tutorials that involve setting up certificates and such, I wonder if there's an easier way.